5 - Household, Court and Kingdom

Summary

So far, this book has mostly focussed on association with the household as a way of being at court. This chapter focusses on how those in the household carried that association into the world outside of the court. It shows that members of the household were important figures in the royal demesne, both as tenants and officers, but also that they brought the idea of the household into use in legal documentation concerning land and rights within the royal demesne and beyond, and that their association with the household in such documents could, apparently, last beyond the end of their formal connection to it.

Historiography on late medieval and early modern Scotland has emphasised the importance of the locality over the centre in elite politics and society. As Jenny Wormald noted, the ‘exercise of local power was never significantly threatened, even by adult kings of considerable personal power. Most of his subjects never saw the king and heard about his affairs only occasionally and belatedly’. For Wormald, this was a source of stability. She was sceptical about the attraction of offices at the centre in such a localised society, arguing that great men had to be persuaded to participate in central government. Wormald instead emphasised ‘the supreme importance of personal contact’ with the king ‘within a political structure that was institutionally underdeveloped’. However, she also acknowledged that, for Scotland's lesser nobility in particular, participation in national affairs was one way of distinguishing themselves. This chapter seeks not to look at this issue from the perspective of individuals in the localities seeking office in the centre but to look at what effect membership of the household, the institution that governed access to the king, had on an individual's position within society more broadly. Thus it does not seek to argue that central offices were more important than local influence but to measure the extent to which, if at all, membership of the household could be a route to higher status and power in wider society.

This line of enquiry might be regarded as a parallel to Wormald's emphasis on the importance of kin groups and bonded groups within society over ‘feudal’ structures.